The present system relates to risk analysis of change objects in a data processing environment.
As businesses grow, one problem is that the amount of change that must be implemented in a given time frame continues to accelerate. Keeping up with the organization's rapidly changing business requirements is becoming increasingly difficult. During the 1990s, companies began to embrace the concept of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and to gravitate toward prewritten business applications such as those provided by SAP AG. SAP is a German acronym for “Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung,” which can be loosely translated into “Systems and Application Products.”
The SAP system has become popular because SAP provides a complete solution to standard business requirements such as manufacturing, accounting, financial management, and human resources. It incorporates ERP concepts and business process reengineering (BPR) into an integrated solution for business applications.
As companies that use SAP grow, they need to modify the SAP system software. As application development projects grow larger, packages are becoming both increasingly important and cumbersome. For example, when changes are made to currently existing Advanced Business Application Programming™ (ABAP) software, the implication of such changes are difficult to foresee, which often causes problems in the future. Having an improved package can make the software's blueprint visible, which can make the changes to the software foreseeable and better protected against malicious changes. United States Patent 20060248507 discusses a method and system for object generation in packages. In one embodiment, the process for generating an object in a package is initiated. The package is created and is associated with a target package. The object is generated into the package.
SAP also provides a standard change transport management system (TMS), which is generally used by customers to manage the changes to SAP system. The native functionality provided by SAP TMS is not capable of performing real-time analysis for risk involved in the change or monitor the change for adherence to the organization policies and procedures. SAP TMS and its implementation tool Solution Manager do not have any configurable policy and procedure module and lack real-time analysis. In addition, neither TMS nor Solution Manager has capabilities to prevent the risky and unwanted changes creeping into the customer's system landscape. This makes the customers SAP system vulnerable to unwanted mistakes, intentional violations, frauds, misuse, and abuse, and is a major problem for IT compliance. The current process of after effect validation by manual processes is ineffective and does not resolve the issue of knowing in advance the after effects of a change in a real-time environment.